The Independent has branded the Coroners and Justice Bill the “greatest threat to civil rights for decades”. They went on to detail the nastier aspects of the bill quoting Shami Chakrabarti. They had this to say about the Convention:
Senior figures in British public life are launching a “call to arms” to highlight the erosion of historic civil liberties.
These campaigners, who include the former director of public prosecutions Sir Ken MacDonald, the former attorney general Lord Goldsmith, as well as the musician Brian Eno and the author Philip Pullman, are backing a series of events to coincide with a major civil rights convention in London next month, at which they will speak. Organisers expect 1,000 people to attend the Convention on Modern Liberty, at which other speakers will include Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, Dominic Grieve, the shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, the campaigning Tory MP, and Lord Bingham, the former law lord.
Organisers of the event, at the Institute of Education, including the TUC and the rights group Liberty, said Britain could become “a new kind of police state”. And yesterday, the journalist Henry Porter, one of the organisers, said: “This is a call to arms,” and he warned of “the constant moves to a database state and threats to an individual”. He added: “This is thoroughly dangerous.” Baroness Helena Kennedy, the human rights lawyer, said: “We are seeing ways in which our system of law and the protections we have as citizens are slowly but surely being undermined. Liberty is being eroded for all of us.”
